Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many health visitors were employed in (a) Wirral, (b) the Liverpool City Region and (c) England in each of the last five years.

NHS Digital publishes Hospital and Community Health Services (HCHS) workforce statistics for England. These include only staff working in hospital trusts and clinical commissioning groups, but not staff working in primary care, local authorities or other providers. Some other organisations also provide health visiting services, so the data held by the Department only reflects a section of the overall health visitor numbers.

The following table shows the full time equivalent (FTE) figures for health visitors for England, Liverpool City Region and Wirral as at 30 September in the specified years and the latest data available:

Source: NHS HCHS monthly workforce statistics, NHS Digital

NHS Digital began to collect and publish data on staff, including health visitors, in some English independent sector healthcare organisations, from September 2015. These statistics are collected biannually and published as experimental statistics. The following table shows the FTE figures of health visitors employed by independent healthcare providers in England who provide valid data, as at 30 September each year since 2015 and the latest data available:

Source: Independent Healthcare Provider Workforce Statistics, England, March 2018, NHS Digital. Trends here may partly reflect which providers NHS Digital gets data from.

Information is not held centrally on number of health visitors in each local authority area.